such that it is much harder to go back up once you go down.

It's not just this election, really. It's that FL2k and OH2k4 now seem to be completely acceptable as well. If this were an isolated event, I wouldn't be so paranoid--I wouldn't like it, but wouldn't be paranoid. Three elections out of the last three have been shams and that can determine a line.

Off to watch the game. Enjoy the fact-checking and narrative building for me :p.

statement that the infant hadn't cried "all day." He was in public view for maybe 10 minutes at the airport and another hour at the convention. This is "all day"?

That kind of statement is just going over to the dark side, IMO.

there's no way in hell that many ppl would have watched a Republican convention nowadays.

than it has to do with her "conversion" at the convention -- attacking Palin is all about avoidance of confronting the fact that four days of peer pressure from the Obamasphere changed her from "not voting to Obama because of Biden" to "enthusiastic about Obama."

In other words, she's attacking Palin in order to convince herself. Without Palin, she'd be just as nuts -- merely nuts about other things.

I'd listen to right-wing radio except possibly to point and laugh at the stupidity. Just because Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller are morons it doesn't mean Rush Limbaugh is worth listening to. Buy an ipod for goddess' sake.

Maybe it's because I grew up with Republican parents (left the GOP during the Clinton Administration over the panty sniffing) and was briefly one as a result until I was about 20, but I've never had a problem seeing Republicans as people. Many of them these days, however, are very bad people (the party people not necessarily the voters). They've driven a lot of the good ones out of the party and replaced them with conservative nutjobs.

Just because the Democrats are corrupt and awful, doesn't mean that the modern day GOP doesn't have a heart of darkness.

Well said, Swift. I'm in exactly the same place. I still can't tolerate right or left-wing talk radio as it has evolved, but I think I've been permanently cured of reflexive demonization of people whose politics or religion I don't share.

I'm daily reminded of Rev. Bill Coffin's really Dalai Lama-like observation that "Everybody thinks they're doing the right thing."

That's the most profound thing anybody ever said to me. It's truly humbling, and remembering it is humility-inducing.

And on a purely practical level, we can never be successful at fighting through right-wing propagand if we can't put our feet in the other guy's shoes and understand why the propaganda speaks so strongly to ther people's beliefs and aspirations.

There were some lines in Palin's speech the other night that made me cringe violently, but at this point in recent political history, a great deal of it had me shouting "Yes!" So now I understand much more fully some Republican voters' deep, deep resentment of typical Democratic politics.

It's been an eye-opening political year, and mostly not in a good way.

He just danced with somebody!

It wasn't a great speech. But it was a good speech, and McCain's no orator.

There's a lot to be said for the balloon drop. They're getting good TV out of it.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

--it should be required, i think. : >

Palin is trying to hide the fact she's very far right, Buchanan reveled in it.

Not to mention that part of Palin's culture war riff was throwing Obama's bitter remarks back in his face. That's just solid politics, using an opponent's self-inflicted wound.

Don't get me wrong, the culture stuff was there, but it was nowhere near the hysteric pitch Buchanan had in 1992. His speech was an explicit call to arms in the culture war:

Mr Clinton, however, has a different agenda.

At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v Wade, he was told there was no place for him at the podium of Bill Clinton's convention, no room at the inn.

Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that convention and exult: "Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history." And so they do.

Bill Clinton supports school choice--but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or Catholic schools, need not apply.

Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery--and life on an Indian reservation.

Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America--abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat--that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country.

A president is also commander in chief, the man we empower to send sons and brothers, fathers and friends, to war.

George Bush was 17 when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school class, walked down to the recruiting office, and signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr Clinton? When Bill Clinton's turn came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.

Which of these two men has won the moral authority to call on Americans to put their lives at risk? I suggest, respectfully, it is the patriot and war hero, Navy Lieutenant J. G. George Herbert Walker Bush.

My friends, this campaign is about philosophy, and it is about character; and George Bush wins on both counts--going away; and it is time all of us came home and stood beside him.

As running mate, Mr Clinton chose Albert Gore. And just how moderate is Prince Albert? Well, according to the Taxpayers Union, Al Gore beat out Teddy Kennedy, two straight years, for the title of biggest spender in the Senate.

And Teddy Kennedy isn't moderate about anything.

In New York, Mr Gore made a startling declaration. Henceforth, he said, the "central organizing principle" of all governments must be: the environment.

Wrong, Albert!

The central organizing principle of this republic is freedom. And from the ancient forests of Oregon, to the Inland Empire of California, America's great middle class has got to start standing up to the environmental extremists who put insects, rats and birds ahead of families, workers and jobs.

[Snip]

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him.

[Snip]

Friends, in those wonderful 25 weeks, the saddest days were the days of the bloody riot in LA, the worst in our history. But even out of that awful tragedy can come a message of hope.

Hours after the violence ended I visited the Army compound in south LA, where an officer of the 18th Cavalry, that had come to rescue the city, introduced me to two of his troopers. They could not have been 20 years old. He told them to recount their story.

They had come into LA late on the 2nd day, and they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage.

Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

As the late Molly Ivins noted at the time, it probably sounded better in the original German.